CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Every other year, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling hosts a competition in which computer systems designed by conference participants try to find the best solution to a planning problem, such as scheduling flights or coordinating tasks for teams of autonomous satellites.

On all but the most straightforward problems, however, even the best planning algorithms still aren't as effective as human beings with a particular aptitude for problem-solving -- such as MIT students.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are trying to improve automated planners by giving them the benefit of human intuition. By encoding the strategies of high-performing human planners in a machine-readable form, they were able to improve the performance of competition-winning planning algorithms by 10 to 15 percent on a challenging set of problems.

The researchers are presenting their results this week at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference.

"In the lab, in other investigations, we've seen that for things like planning and scheduling and optimization, there's usually a small set of people who are truly outstanding at it," says Julie Shah, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. "Can we take the insights and the high-level strategies from the few people who are truly excellent at it and allow a machine to make use of that to be better at problem-solving than the vast majority of the population?